#44 — Lars and the Real Girl (Craig Gillespie, 2007)
Movies are routinely celebrated for making the impossible happen. This praise is usually reserved for spectacles of special effects that send superheroes slicing across the sky or warriors facing off amidst the stars. But there’s a even more impressive sort of cinematic sorcery that sometimes occurs. Just the right combination of empathetic screenwriting, committed acting and directing that strikes exactly the right tone can combine to take the most preposterous premise and transform it into something smart and meaningful, maybe even sublime. This is precisely the unlikely achievement of Lars and the Real Girl.

Ryan Gosling plays the title character (well, one of the title characters), a socially stunted young man in a small Wisconsin town, bracing himself for any interaction he faces in his cubicled workplace, and hustling home to a life of solitude in a garage apartment outside of the house he grew up in, a house since reclaimed by his older brother and his wife. Lars is an aching outcast. He tenses up when a pretty coworker or his pregnant sister-in-law reach out to his, their overtures of compassion so foreign to him that he enters a sort of petrified lockdown mode. He’s so far gone that the only person he can relate to is fabricated. He orders a life-size, realistic doll off of the Internet. The manufacturer’s intent is for the doll to be a sex toy, but Lars dresses her demurely, speaks of her sensitivity due to a religious upbringing and introduces her as his new girlfriend, Bianca.

It’s the stuff of goofy comedy, but not in this instance. Nancy Oliver’s inspired script is built around the ways in which this doll is Lars’s pathway out of himself, his conduit to the world he lives in, but can’t interact with. Bianca gives him courage to engage in the simple social excursions that he previously avoided: dinner with his family or a neighborhood party. It also gives everyone else a chance to reconnect with Lars. Worried about the potential fragility of his mental state the entire community agrees to play along, to perpetuate the self-deception. In doing so, they get to rediscover this lost son, this man they’ve known since he was a boy, who they’ve watched drift into his impenetrable shell. By connecting with Bianca–supporting her, celebrating her, electing her to public office–they’re actually connecting with Lars, giving her the affection they’ve longed to shower upon him. This could easily be contrived. Instead, it emerges as organically as something can in a work of fiction. It feels like a proper expression of togetherness that can come from a close-knit community. The individual details are humorous. The overall picture is surprisingly moving.

This is accomplished through Oliver’s humanistic insight and Craig Gillespie’s resolutely nonjudgmental approach to the material. It’s also hugely dependent on the acting of those involved, led by Paul Schneider and Emily Mortimer as Lars’s brother and sister-in-law. They’re the first to meet Bianca, and the mix of confusion, revulsion, worry and finally sympathy they bring to the encounter colors and shapes all that follows. It’s critical that their reaction is believable. Their worry for Lars, their sense of guilt at his stunted life helps explain why they’d support the delusion, and Schneider and Mortimer hit these notes with compelling grace. As Lars opens up, they do, too, helping him grow by allowing him to see their own vulnerabilities. The same thing happens with his sweetly enamored co-worker, played with kind-hearted enthusiasm by Kelli Garner, who maybe understands Lars’s connection to Bianca thanks to her own emotional attachment to the stuffed animals settled on her work desk. The delicate dance of all of these people finding the better parts of themselves due to the presence of an inanimate companion is often funny, always piercingly honest.

There’s one more performance that needs to be noted, arguably the most crucial one of all. As Lars, Ryan Gosling is spectacular, turning his trademark intensity in on itself. He shows Lars’s awkwardness and anxiety with a clenched physicality, which makes his gradual emergence seem even more freeing. As he shares his life and thoughts before the safety of Bianca’s unchanging gaze, it’s like he’s engaging in a trial run for life, and Gosling perfectly, tenderly conveys the sensations of a troubled man learning how to feel joy. It’s a wide open performance in a warm, deeply considered film. You wind up feeling that developing joy right along with him.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)